22 July 2014

A Message from #TeamIsaiah

Isaiah Rider
is a child from Kansas City who is being held in Luries Children's
Hospital in Chicago against his mother's wishes. Like the Justina
Pelletier story, in this case, the mom asked for a medical opinion and
the hospital decided it was going to run the show instead of her. Foster children like Isaiah are being used for medical experiments without their family's consent. The following is copy/pasted from the Team Isaiah facebook page and is used with permission. This story needs to get much more coverage:

Isaiah wants to be home Aug. 27 for his birthday!

Medical
experiments conducted on vulnerable people, people who are unable to
give consent or people who have been misled, are always wrong. It is
also wrong when there is reason to believe that the person undergoing
the experiment faces serious risks as a result. If you put the two
together you have something we used to call a crime. In fact, we
prosecuted the Nazis for this behavior.

But it turns out that we have been using children in foster care as if they were medical lab rats in some states.

Some states such as Tennessee and Wisconsin simply don’t allow for
foster children to be used in medical studies. California requires a
court order. Other states allow foster children to be involved in
medical studies but under varying criteria, the children are supposed to
have independent advocates to protect their interests.

MSNBC
reports that for the past two decades the government conducted
experiments involving drugs for AIDS on foster children but without the
legal protections they should have had.

“The practice ensured
that foster children — mostly poor or minority — received care from
world-class researchers at government expense, slowing their rate of
death and extending their lives. But it also exposed a vulnerable
population to the risks of medical research and drugs that were known to
have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for
children was unknown.” (my emphasis)

The results of these
experiments ranged from minor adverse side effects to “a disturbing
higher rate of death among children who took higher doses of the drug.”

Most of these experiments were conducted in the 1990’s in seven states:
Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and
Texas.

So what happened? The simplest way to put it is the rules were broken.

In Illinois, researchers signed documents promising to provide the
affected children with advocates, but it never happened. Not for a
single one of the 200 children in the study.

Less than a third
of the children in New York City were provided with an advocate, despite
the city’s policy requiring it. The same thing happened to the
children studied at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital and Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore.

Of course, one can point to the fact that state agencies gave consent for these children to be placed in the studies.

Welcome!

I'm Christine! I live near Kansas City, Missouri, and I like Polish pottery a little bit. This blog is mostly about our homeschooling adventures, family life and my assorted oddball opinions. I'd love it if you left a comment and said hello!